Driverless cars will make police chases 'lethal'

Driverless cars will be "lethal
weapons" that pave the way for extreme police car chases. That's
according to a restricted FBI Strategic Issues Group report the
Guardian has in its possession, having put in a public
records request for the document.

The words echo the UK's own Ministry of Defence report out this
week, Global Strategic Trends. In that report, the government
predicted that by 2045 -- aside from the famine, drought and
disease that will devaste populations -- autonomous vehicles will
be the ones to watch out for. It stated that yes, the cars would
reduce the risk of human error that leads to accidents (or violent
assaults as a result of road rage). But there's more. "Greater
reliance on automated technologies could provide scope for
terrorists and criminals to disrupt the transport system through
cyber attacks."

Now the FBI has gone as far as calling the cars -- in
development by Google, BMW, Daimler AG and many others -- lethal.
According to the Guardian report, the vehicles "will have a high
impact on transforming what both law enforcement and its
adversaries can operationally do with a car". Basically, instead of
driving away super fast, and perhaps shooting a gun haphazardly out
the window at law enforcement, when driverless cars enter the
space: "bad actors will be able to conduct tasks that require use
of both hands or taking one's eyes off the road which would be
impossible today." They could of course now, always make sure they
make a get away with a criminal pal to concentrate on the
driving.

It's this "dual-use application" of the car as both safety net
for the average human driver, and weapon for the bad guys, that
it's most concerned with.

Of course the point of driverless cars is that they are safe --
they will follow a predetermined route and keep at a safe speed by
monitoring surrounding traffic with a system of lidar and cameras.
However, they could also be open to hacks. The police will
presumably want to ensure they can drive at whatever speed they
choose -- and lawmakers in some parts of the world want to ensure a
driverless car is always, well, driveable if needed. Much of the FBI report also seems to
relate to how law enforcement operations will fare -- it will help
them reduce time wasted on pesky three-point turns, when pursuing a
suspect, the report says.

Cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab recently joined with marketing
and digital media company IAB to launch the First Annual Connected Cars Study. In it, the two assess the
risks posed by connected vehicles that will need software updates
and be linked to mobile devices. They have identified the potential
ways in which the system can be hacked to create new digital keys
to the vehicle, software updates to the car could be modified
maliciously and they could hack the SIM in the vehicle -- used for
communicating with the driver -- to issue fake driving
instructions.